


The World Changes Orbit Around You

by slytheringreen91



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Depression, POV John Watson, POV Sherlock Holmes, Poor John, Sorry Not Sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 22:11:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3994807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slytheringreen91/pseuds/slytheringreen91
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is dying. He contemplates John. </p>
<p>Sherlock is dead. John finds a familiar letter among Sherlock's possessions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World Changes Orbit Around You

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everyone! My very best friend requested this story ages ago and I promised it to her. It's about a year late, but what can you do? 
> 
> I own nothing. Only the story is mine. All except the letter. My friend wrote most of that and has given me permission to use it in the story. 
> 
> All mistakes are my own. 
> 
> I hope you guys like it!

It comes as a shock. I think more to me than him for once. Maybe it’s his vast experience with war wounds. Maybe it’s something else about him. There’s so much I don’t know because . . . let’s be honest, he doesn’t share.

People say I don’t know how to share and maybe they’re right. I share too much or too little. The wrong, inappropriate things. Or just at the wrong times. I don’t know how to share, but I do share when the mood comes over me.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently and he doesn’t share much of himself either. Less than me. What he does share comes at all the right times and in ways that make others like him and think he’s their friend, but they’re not actually learning about him, they don’t know him.

Do I?

I’m not sure. A thousand bits of life scroll across my eyelids as I try to answer this question. _John is draping a blanket around my shoulders while I sit at the kitchen table, peering through the microscope._ He knows sometimes the air bothers my sensitive skin when the window is open. It’s the reason I wear the coat, sometimes, even when it’s not particularly cold.

_He is forcing me to eat. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t disturb the Work, just shoves food in my hand and sits back to watch me, to make sure._ He always brings something I’m willing to eat. There are . . . aversions to food that I like to hide and pretend don’t exist because of all the things that removed me from people over the years, sometimes those aversion feel like the most important. But he knows. Must have observed. How could I not have noticed?

_A million other instances of care and concern and friendship flood my brain until everything but the man in front of me is blocked out. Everything but him and the countdown._ 3 minutes.

Then come the moments I dread to remember. Times I could have, should have, helped but didn’t. Sometimes I didn’t understand until much later what the appropriate course of action was. Sometimes I was busy with the Work and I knew John would wait until I was finished to deal with himself (even if that meant he never got dealt with). Sometimes I just didn’t care and it’s those times that torture me the most as I lay here, breathing close to my last.

And the Letter. The Letter torments me most of all . . .

It seems like I’ve been lying here forever, pondering John, but it can’t have been as long as all that. John is only now making his way over to me, gun in hand and pointed at the ground. I have to assume my attacker . . . my murderer, is dead. John wouldn’t let him live to tell the tale of killing ‘the great Sherlock Holmes’.

He makes his way over to me, but doesn’t speak. He quickly moves my hand away from the wound and looks it over.

I watch as final realization comes over him. This is what he expected, I saw it the moment I was shot, but believing is probably different from seeing. People are funny that way sometimes. John not least of all.

I’m not going to survive this wound. I know that. Seeing John come to know it just confirms the fact. It’s going to kill me here, on the ground in . . . less than 2 minutes.

My mind is slowing. It’s deleting all of the unimportant bits. The bits that used to be my life . . . the Work. Only John remains. John and the countdown.

John’s face drains of blood and starts turning gray. He looks almost as if he were the one laying on the asphalt dying, in place of me.

“She . . . Sherlock. Okay, it’s going to be okay.” He starts applying pressure to the wound. It hurts and it makes me want to laugh, but laughing hurts too. John is going to have to see my blood on his hands and I know that’s going to haunt him.

I remember how haunted he was after Lazarus and he hadn’t even seen all of it. There wasn’t a horrible amount of blood. There was absolutely nothing to be done as far as he was concerned. Perhaps most importantly, it was sudden. There was no living, breathing, _dying_ person to deal with. Just the man he had been talking to on the phone. The jump. A dead body laying on the ground.

This in-between is going to kill him and there’s going to be no one left to comfort him.

“Just need to keep some pressure on the wound. The paramedics are on their way. You’re going to be _fine_.”

John says it like a demand but I see his eyes pinch, his jaw tick. He knows I can’t surpass his expectations this time.

. . . It hurts me to have to say it because I know that it will hurt him. But it needs to be said. Perhaps some day these words will be a comfort to him. That I may help him in death as he helped me in life seems . . . right. Not symbolic or anything as plebeian as all that. Just _right_ , in the same way that it’s right when a hard rain falls after a long hot summer day.

More likely, I’ll only hurt him further. It’s not what I want, but it’s what we’ve always been and I guess that’s what we’ll be until the end. So I say the words my mind provides one last time, in hope that I may bring some comfort . . . closure . . . to the only person I ever truly considered my friend. “As always, my dear friend, you see but you do not observe”.

And then, though I didn’t mean to add anything else, just meant to slip quietly away “It’s okay John. It will all be alright.”

And suddenly, there’s nothing.

 

_________________________________________________________________

 

I walk into the Baker Street apartment. My home. It was, anyway.

I’m numb from days of questions, days of words, days of the dead. I thought I’d be emotionless by now. I’m not.

I make myself tea and make my way over to my chair, settling down just like a thousand times before. I stare and stare out the window, not thinking.

It might be minutes, hours, days later (my head won’t keep count anymore) when I decide to go through Sherlock’s things. There’s no one else to do it. Mycroft . . . if it were up to him Baker Street wouldn’t be touched. He’d continue to pay Sherlocks’s rent to Mrs. Hudson and have no one ever step foot in the apartment again. Just to have a little piece of his brother still living in the world, still the same.

I’m different. I know Sherlock is dead. I want to know what he left behind, discover things about him I never knew. I want to feel close to my friend, one last time.

I start with his bedside drawer. Let’s be honest, I wasn’t going to find anything _embarrassing_  somewhere as obvious as that. I’m not quite ready for that yet.

It turns out that I’m not ready for what I _do_ find, either.

At the very bottom of the drawer, beneath tiny books and maps (used for our most recent . . . last . . . case) and beneath needles ( _Jesus, Sherlock_ ), I see it. A little scrap of paper that makes my heart stop. I recognize the bent, torn page, if not the tiny scorch marks. _How the hell had he gotten it, mostly intact, out of the fire?_

It makes me remember my service weapon, sitting on the kitchen table. Makes me remember the way the cold metal felt against my temple.

I know what it is, suspect what it will do to me. It’s from a time in my life I’d rather forget, but one which I’m starting to understand I’m in again. Six years later and I’m back where I started. Probably worse off, to be honest. I don’t want to read it, don’t want to remember, not yet.

I pick up the page.

 

_It's because I want someone to care for and notice me as much as I care for and notice them._

_I blow things out of proportion so I don't seem so much like myself. So that I might attract the interest of another human being._

_I'm actually the one that needs the comforting. I am always so strong, am always on guard . . .all the time . . . I need someone to allow me to slump, to be my support when my leg trembles._

_"The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care...right? Yeah."_

_But it's just me being selfish._

_I have monsters too, you know._

_So all of this is just for me? But people like it when you care for others . . . for them . . ._

_I hope nobody sees this._

_What am I saying, yes I do. You think I wrote this for me? No. I already know. Someone else has to find it and tell me it's all okay._

_J. H. Watson_

 

Scrawled on the bottom of the note, in a hurry, like the person writing had somewhere more important to be, there are words written in another hand. The note is dated three days ago, just before . . .

_It was the husband. Killed wife with staple gun. Review office supplies as possible future weapons._

_Get biscuits and milk while out._

_Have long discussion with John about his lack of observation skills. Cannot be allowed to believe he is uncared for. Ridiculous._

_S.H._

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments are always appreciated :)


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